SpokenWord Paris

Bonne Année!  Happy New Year, you sweet people you!  Open Secret, your arched-stone cave alternative open mic experience, is getting dressed up in The Emperor’s New Clothes 😉 to “ring in the new,” with you!  Got my jester’s cap & bell ready. . .

Wednesdays downstairs at Le Bistrot des Artistes, 6 rue des Anglais (a skinny baguette that points at Boulevard Saint Germain & rue Lagrange), 75005 Paris, France, Le Monde, The Big Surreal 3D Surround-Sound Film Called Life. 😉  Metro Maubert-Mutualité (line 10) & Saint-Michel (line 4).

8:30pm, nightlong sign-up does its vocal warm-ups, & at 9 the proverbial fat lady sings!  Tonight featuring brilliant & important poets John Swain & Youssef Alaoui-Fdili…more about these visiting artists below.  And some of their ultra-fine poetry!

Yes!  The promised, precious secrets of yet another generous year are soon to be here, “Open Secrets” we are eager to rip open – so much multicolored gift wrap.  “Make it new!” proclaimed that controversial ‘better maker’ to whom T.S. dedicated The Waste Land, my fave brain-candy for the last 25 years.  Quite a can o’ sour gummy worms! 😉

“Make it new!”  That is our Not-Theme, but Thing to Do, for tonight’s year-end/Happy Freakin’ New Year episode of SpokenWord Paris’s sister open mic.  In Canto LIII, good ol’ Ezra commemorated the Chinese emperor Tching Tang [Ch’êng T’ang], founder of the Shang Dynasty in the eighteenth century, who in Pound’s account wrote “MAKE IT NEW / on his bath tub / Day by day make it new.”  Dig – that major motto of Modernism.

Here is my New Year’s offering to you, my holiday song “Kiss the Clouds,” which I just recorded live at Leo’s 😉 onto SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/david-leo-957067099/kiss-the-clouds-this-is-my

Happy New Year two-thousand & sixteen!  From your spaceshot-in-residence host, David “Leo the Big Ego Lion” “Puff the Magic Dragon” “He poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once…Yorick…the king’s jester” “Joy Division/New Order” Sirois.

Open Secret is a gathering-of-the-tribes of artists: poets, & singer/songwriters, comedians, & storytellers, performance artists, directors, actors…creators & listeners of every genus (genius) & species. 😉  Come see what community feels like…this week our two exquisite Special Guest Poets: John Swain (see poem below) visiting us from Louisville, Kentucky, USA; & Youssef Alaoui-Fdili, whom you may have seen featuring at SpokenWord last week.

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John Swain lives in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Ring the Sycamore Sky (Red Paint Hill) and Under the Mountain Born (Least Bittern Books)…

The Winnowing

Daybreak and the remains of the sky finally knelt

on the blue expanse of its vibrance shining like weaponry,

I cried praises for your heart’s warmer lasting.

Twilight colors crater pools like a bruise on purple fruit,

we washed our callused hands there

to touch dawn and be clean.

Shade created pale havens on the paths of weathered stones

where the river deposits its rust wash and corroded barrels.

Juniper trembled in the wind like my lips against cloth,

the intention and circumstance held bright sails to your nape

as your skirts trail the gentlest flow of water like pure idea.

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Youssef Alaoui-Fdili’s Bio:

Moroccan-Latino, born in California. His family and heritage are an endless source of inspiration for his varied, dark, spiritual and carnal writings. He has an MFA in Poetics from New College of California. There, he studied Classical Arabic, Spanish Baroque and Contemporary Moroccan poetry. He is also well versed in the most dour and macabre literature of the 19th Century. His poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, 580 Split, Cherry Bleeds, Carcinogenic Poetry, Red Fez, Big Bridge, Dusie Press, and nominated for a Pushcart at Full of Crow. Youssef is an original creator of the East Bay literary arts festival “Beast Crawl.”

http://www.carcinogenicpoetry.com/2011/08/youssef-alaoui-fdili-one-poem.html

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I welcome you to come join us tonight at Le Bistrot des Artistes, share something of your great creative self (or simply listen with both ears).  Let’s “Make it new!” 🙂

The Many Hats of SpokenWord: a special, unprecedented gathering of like-minded, stellar poets David Barnes, Alberto Rigettini, David Leo Sirois, Bruce Sherfield, & Troy Yorke.  Saturday, 19th December, 2015, 7:30 PM @ Berkeley Books of Paris – 8 rue Casimir Delavigne, Métro Odéon (lines 4 & 10).

The hosts of SpokenWord Paris, Open Secret, the Other Writers’ Group (at Shakespeare and Company), and the editors of THE BASTILLE magazine, all reading together at beautiful Berkeley Books.  Hear them for more than 5 minutes at a time!  Join us, and then we gonna storm the streets and bars of Paris for an impromptu SpokenWord Xmas party…

David Barnes is the founder of SpokenWord Paris and the Other Writers’ Group. He co-edited the anthology Strangers in Paris: New Writing Inspired by the City of Light (Tightrope Books, 2011) and self-publishes The Bastille Lit Magazine. He won Shakespeare & Company’s Travel In Words short story competition in 2006. His poems have been published in Spot Lit Magazine, 34th Parallel, Upstairs At Duroc, Retort Magazine and elsewhere.

Alberto Rigettini, Italian, is a poet, playwright, screenwriter, poetry pimp and freak-show barker. He is host of “SpokenWord Paris”, the fight club “Writers Get Violent” and “The Poetry Brothel in Paris”. He has been awarded The Lorca in Translation Competition, the Troubadour International Poetry Prize and his writing is included in the anthology Strangers in Paris: New Writing Inspired by the City of Light. He is currently writing a poetry collection in 5 settings: London, Spain, Italy, U.S. and France.

David Leo Sirois:
Host of (SpokenWord 2) Open Secret and doorman at SpokenWord. Born in New Brunswick, Canada, and grew up across the border in Madawaska, Maine, as a dual citizen. Living in Paris for the last 4 & 1/2 years, his poems have appeared in Anglophone Parisian magazines THE BASTILLE, Belleville Park Pages, and Paris Lit Up, The Keystone Anthology (UK), Radical Lines From a Lit City (anthology by Bob-Davis), as well as the French journal Terre à Ciel; also the US-based anthology Becoming Fire: Spiritual Writing from Rising Generations, Silo, Poesy, Ibbetson Street Press, Echoes: A Northern Maine Journal, and more – 33 publications between the two countries. TimeOut Paris described him as “a kind of Woody Allen in rhymes, who captivates the audience with a totally personal science of recitation.”  His forthcoming, 21-years-in-the-making first book, Silver Shiver Fragment, will be published by SpokenWord Paris.

Bruce Sherfield is an American artist living in Paris. He is a co-editor/designer of The Bastille and co-runs the Other Writers’ Group at Shakespeare & Company. He has been an invited artist/speaker to mentor young poets in Africa three times in 2015 courtesy of the US Embassy. His band, the Sophia Lorenians, will release its 2nd album, Sex,Tape and Girls, this fall. He is a professional voice artist and actor. He loves juicing with his friends (and enemies) and teaching his son about typewriters. Quote: “I firmly propose that every creative community can only be as strong as its least passionate members.”

Troy Yorke. Performer, Writer, Coach, Composer, Pianist, Actor. His poetry has been published internationally in small magazines and was selected for Australia’s Vine Leaves Literary Journal “Best of 2013 Anthology”. He is on the editorial team for the Paris-based magazine THE BASTILLE. His first collection of poetry, Hole in My Side, was published by corrupt press in 2014.